Posts in Design (20 found)
ava's blog Yesterday

rose ▪ bud ▪ thorn - february 2026

Reply via email Published 28 Feb, 2026 5 year anniversary with my wife. :) Started a creation event for the Gazette. I created more art! I made some buttons and banners, and some pixel art for myself and with Xaya . I rebranded my professional website (not this one). Put a lot of effort into the colors, associations, text, font and all, with a proper brand kit development. That's a first. I had a healthier relationship with food recently. I managed to summarize and translate 1-2 court decisions each week for noyb.eu, and I became Silver Member (10+ translated/summarized court cases). 2 more and I will already be Gold Member (20+). I received a some helpful replies to e-mail inquiries for opportunities :) I was finally able to publish the first interview for my privacy professionals series! Friends visited and it wasn't just fun, but it also got me cleaning up the apartment so well. My wife is baking amazing bread recently. The first two to three attempts were a disappointing, but we kept at it and now our bread is sooooo good. She also baked me some matcha strawberry sugar cookies. My hair is long enough now to properly take care of it again with conditioner and oils. I can't wait until it grows long enough for a first haircut to kind of get it even and not so layered; I am also thinking of getting bangs? They always annoy me, but I think I can make it work this time...? I always think that... and at the same time, I also wanna grow it out again and bleach some money pieces. And I kinda wanna dye the underside of my hair, near my neck, too? I am conflicted. Still working on sending out e-mails for more interviews. Working on switching away from Discord! Probably Matrix. Already had an account there but it somehow got lost, so I made a new one. Now just working on transitioning some stuff. I've decluttered my closet, now I just need to sell the stuff. I'm planning a date day for myself where I get my nails done again (haven't done that in months), a lash lift, a visit to the cinema, and buying some clothing I need. I am in need of replacing some items and also diving deeper into a new personal style I want. Reintroducing caffeine has been a bust. My tolerance seems to have been plummeting to zero thanks to my experiment, and even very weak black tea is having some negative effects... and even my matcha! I guess I'll have to reduce it to once a week. I haven't been studying nearly as much as I should. I've been indulging a lot in just resting, reading, and creating, which isn't super bad, but I feel guilty for neglecting my studies when I have 4 upcoming exams for modules totaling 30 ECTS as a part-time student. :( Job applications and apartment hunting paused for now. Right now seems like an absolutely terrible time for both.

career Career design Design
0 views
iDiallo 6 days ago

The Little Red Dot

Sometimes, I have 50 tabs open. Looking for a single piece of information ends up being a rapid click on each tab until I find what I'm looking for. Somehow, every time I get to that LinkedIn tab, I pause for a second. I just have to click on the little red dot in the top right corner, see that there is nothing new, then resume my clicking. Why is that? Why can't I ignore the red notification badge? When you sign up for LinkedIn for the first time, it's right there. A little red dot in the top right corner with a number in it. It stands out against the muted grays and blues of the interface. Click on it, and you'll discover you have a notification. It's not from someone you know; this is a fresh new account, after all. But the dot was there anyway. Add a few connections, give it some time, and come back. Refresh the page, and you'll have new notifications waiting. If your LinkedIn account is like mine, a ghost town, you still get the little red dot. My connections and I usually keep a few recruiters in our networks, an insurance policy in case we need to find work quickly. But we rarely, if ever, post anything. Yet whenever I log in, there's a new notification. Sometimes it's even a message, but not from anyone in my connections list. It's from LinkedIn itself. The little red dot isn't exclusive to LinkedIn. My Facebook account has been dormant for years, yet those few times annually when I log in, the notifications are right there waiting for me. I've even visited news websites where the little red dot appeared for reasons I couldn't understand. I didn't have an account, so what exactly were they notifying me about? That little red dot is a sophisticated psychological trigger designed to exploit the brain. It activates the brain's Salience Network . Think of it as a circuit breaker that alerts us to immediate threats. When triggered, it signals that the brain should redirect its resources to something new. The color red is not chosen by accident either. On my Twitter app, the notification is a blue dot, which I hardly ever notice (don't tell them that). But red triggers our brain to perceive urgency. We feel compelled to address it immediately. The little red dot fools us into believing that something trivial is actually urgent. Check your phone and you'll notice all the app icons with a little red dot in their top right corner. Most, if not all, social media alerts function as false alarms, and they gradually compromise our ability to focus on what matters. Whenever you spot the little red dot, you feel compelled to click it. It promises a new connection, a message, a validation of some sort. It doesn't matter that you are almost always disappointed afterward, because you will be presented with content that keeps you scrolling, never remembering how you got there. Facebook used to show the little red dot in their email notifications. When there is activity on your account, say you were tagged in a photo, Facebook sends you an email and in the top right corner, they draw a little red dot on the bell icon. Obviously, you have to click it so you don't miss out. There was a Netflix documentary released a few years ago called The Social Dilemma , an inside look at how social media manipulates its users. Whether intentional or not, their website featured a bell icon with a little red dot on it. You visit the site for the first time, and it shows that you have one notification. There's no way around it, you are psychologically enticed to click. A notification is supposed to be a tool, and a tool patiently waits for someone to use it. But the little red dot seduces you because it wants something from you. It's all part of habit-forming technology: the engagement loop. The engagement loop follows three steps: a cue (the notification), a routine (an action such as scrolling), and a reward (likes, a dopamine hit). From the social media platform's perspective, this is a tool for boosting retention. From the user's perspective, it's Pavlovian conditioning. For every possible event, LinkedIn will send you a notification. Someone wants to join your network. Someone has endorsed your skills. A group is discussing a topic. Each notification generates a red dot on your mobile device, pulling you back into actions that benefit LinkedIn's system. In the documentary, they show that this pattern is just the tip of the iceberg. Beneath the surface lies a data-driven, manipulative machine that feeds on our behavior and engineers the next trick to bring us back to the platform. For my part, I've disabled notifications from all non-essential apps. No Instagram updates, no Robinhood alerts, no WhatsApp group messages. I receive messages from people I know. That's pretty much it. For everything else, I have to deliberately seek out information. That said, I did see another approach in the wild. Some people simply don't care about notifications. Every app on their phone has a little red dot with the number "99" on it. They haven't read their messages and aren't planning to. You're lucky if they ever answer your call. I'm not sure whether this is a good or bad thing... but it's a thing. That little red dot represents something larger than a notification system. It's the visible tip of an infrastructure built to capture and commodify human attention. The addictiveness of social media isn't an unfortunate byproduct of connecting the world. Right now it's the most profitable business model. The more addictive the platform, the more you engage; the more you engage, the more advertisements you see. This addiction shapes behavior, consumes time, and affects mental wellbeing, all while companies profit from it.

Psychology design Design
0 views
Justin Duke 1 weeks ago

Maybe use Plain

When I wrote about Help Scout , much of my praise was appositional. They were the one tool I saw that did not aggressively shoehorn you into using them as a CRM to the detriment of the core product itself. This is still true. They launched a redesign that I personally don't love, but purely on subjective grounds. And there's still a fairly reasonable option for — and I mean this in a non-derogatory way — baby's first support system. I will call out also: if you want something even simpler, Jelly , which is an app that leans fully into the shared inbox side of things. It is less featureful than Help Scout, but with a better design and lower price point. If I was starting a new app today, this is what I would reach for first. But nowadays I use Plain . Plain will not solve all of your problems overnight. It's only a marginally more expensive product — $35 per user per month compared to Help Scout's $25 per user per month. The built-in Linear integration is worth its weight in gold if you're already using Linear, and its customer cards (the equivalent of Help Scout's sidebar widgets) are marginally more ergonomic to work with. The biggest downside that we've had thus far is reliability — less in a cosmic or existential sense and more that Plain has had a disquieting number of small-potatoes incidents over the past three to six months. My personal flowchart for what service to use in this genre is something like: But the biggest thing to do is take the tooling and gravity of support seriously as early as you can. Start with Jelly. If I need something more than that, see if anyone else on the team has specific experience that they care a lot about, because half the game here is in muscle memory rather than functionality. If not, use Plain.

business Business design Design
0 views
Jim Nielsen 1 weeks ago

A Few Rambling Observations on Care

In this new AI world, “taste” is the thing everyone claims is the new supreme skill. But I think “care” is the one I want to see in the products I buy. Can you measure care? Does scale drive out care? If a product conversation is reduced to being arbitrated exclusively by numbers, is care lost? The more I think about it, care seems antithetical to the reductive nature of quantification — “one death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic”. Care considers useful, constructive systematic forces — rules, processes, etc. — but does not take them as law. Individual context and sensitivity are the primary considerations. That’s why the professional answer to so many questions is: “it depends”. “This is the law for everyone, everywhere, always” is not a system I want to live in. Businesses exist to make money, so one would assume a business will always act in a way that maximizes the amount of money that can be made. That’s where numbers take you. They let you measure who is gaining or losing the most quantifiable amount in any given transaction. But there’s an unmeasurable, unquantifiable principle lurking behind all those numbers: it can be good for business to leave money on the table. Why? Because you care. You are willing to provision room for something beyond just a quantity, a number, a dollar amount. I don’t think numbers alone can bring you to care . I mean, how silly is it to say: “How much care did you put into the product this week?” “Put me down for a 8 out of 10 this week.” Reply via: Email · Mastodon · Bluesky

design Design programming Programming business Business
0 views
ava's blog 1 weeks ago

[event] my bearblog creations

As part of the Grizzly Gazette event , I thought I'd made some buttons, a forum signature, and a little joke graphic. Feel free to use. Reply via email Published 17 Feb, 2026

design Design web-development Web Development entertainment Entertainment
0 views
Jason Fried 1 weeks ago

A new interview

Build Products for Yourself Low Costs, Small Company, Enough Customers Your Only Competition Is Your Costs How 37signals Stays Lean Rewriting Basecamp & Fighting Software Bloat Why "Enough" Beats Growth Product People vs. Business Shells The "So What?" Mindset Staying Close to Customers The Reward for Good Work Is More Work Six-Week Horizons & Compounding Decisions Anti-Fragile Business With Tiny Units Galápagos Product Design Radical Authenticity Over Marketing Tricks Rick Rubin & Intuition-Driven Building Lightning in a Bottle & Knowing When to Stop Defining Success: Pride in the Work Independence Through Profitability When Tech Adds Friction Instead of Value Ruthless Editing & What Never Changes Longevity as the Moat Building by Intuition

business Business design Design
0 views
Shrivu’s Substack 1 weeks ago

Taste Is Not a Moat

I used to write the design while AI coded the software. Architecture decisions, API contracts, data models on my side; implementation on its side. Fast forward a few months and more and more the model now handles both, because it’s more right than wrong. The “outer loop” of system design, the thing that engineers would do while AI wrote the the code, turned out to be just another task it would absorb. Over the past year, Tech Twitter has mostly converged on the same answer to this problem 1 . As AI eats execution, taste is the moat. And while they’re right about taste mattering. I’m less sure about the moat part. A moat is something you build once and defend. Taste feels more like alpha 2 : a decaying edge, only valuable relative to a rising baseline. And that baseline is rising faster than many realize. Cartoon via Nano Banana. In this post, I wanted to focus on taste; how it changes the human role and questions around who owns it. Every domain has a threshold where AI crosses from “clearly worse” to “good enough to fool experts.” Those thresholds are falling fast as the models get better and organizations get better at providing the right context. 2024: AI could autocomplete but not architect. Copilot suggestions had a higher churn rate than human code. AI-generated marketing copy was formulaic and easy to spot. AI-generated playlists were novelties, not chart contenders. AI hiring meant keyword-matching resumes with well-documented bias. The consensus across every domain was the same: AI can handle the grunt work, but taste, judgment, and design are ours. 2025: “Vibe coding” became mainstream. Consumers rated AI marketing copy better than professional copywriters. Music listeners couldn’t distinguish AI music from human music. Frontier models are matching human experts on nearly half of tasks across occupations, completing them 100x faster and 100x cheaper. In twelve months, “AI can’t do X” became “AI does X better than most people” in domain after domain. 2026: The majority of US developers use AI coding tools daily. AI-generated music accounts for over a third of daily uploads on major platforms. The question is no longer whether AI can match human taste in a given domain, but how long until it does in yours. This is why I see taste as alpha, not a moat. My judgment is only valuable relative to what AI can do by default, and that default resets every few months. If taste decays, the question stops being “do you have it?” and starts being “how fast can you get it into a system before the baseline catches up?” Thanks for reading Shrivu’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Even as taste decays as a durable advantage, it’s becoming the primary thing organizations pay humans to do (on top of just having the agency to use AI to do their job) 3 . Having taste matters just as much as being able to communicate it. Out of the box, many of us can’t fully articulate why we prefer one design over another, why this copy lands and that one doesn’t, why this architecture will scale and that one won’t. The knowledge is tacit, embodied in instinct rather than rules. However, jobs are shifting from executor to taste extractor: someone whose primary skill is getting their judgment into the system. The best hire for an AI-native marketing team isn’t the person with the most original campaign ideas (despite their ‘taste moat’). It also isn’t the person with mediocre instincts who happens to be good at prompting ChatGPT. It’s the person with N years of pattern recognition about what converts, what falls flat, and why, who can turn that into something a system can use. Their day-to-day looks nothing like a traditional marketer’s. They spend the morning reviewing AI-generated campaign variants, not writing them. They run A/B interviews against their own preferences to build an Essence document for the brand’s voice. They flag the three outputs out of twenty that feel subtly wrong and articulate what’s off: too eager, wrong register for the audience, buries the value prop. That articulation becomes a constraint the system applies to the next hundred outputs. By afternoon they’re not writing copy; they’re tuning the machine that writes copy. It’s not “creativity” in the traditional sense and it’s not “prompt engineering” in the shallow sense. Taste extraction builds a persistent model of your judgment that compounds across every output after it. It’s the ability to encode experienced judgment into a system that scales it. The pattern applies to plenty of taste-heavy roles: Designers stop pushing pixels and start curating. Recruiters stop screening and start calibrating for “high potential”. Product managers stop writing specs and start steering batches of features. Your taste can be a black box. You know what good looks like when you see it. You probably can’t explain why. Extraction is about surfacing that tacit judgment so a system can act on it and so you can leverage up on your productivity. Without extraction, your outcomes with AI drift. Prompt the same task across sessions without a persistent reference document and the AI reconstructs from training data priors each time; the output flattens toward the sloppy median 4 . There are a couple ways I’ve been experimenting with getting better at this. They apply across domains, not just code. Have AI present you with paired options and ask which you prefer and why. Your explanations, especially the ones you struggle to articulate, are the signal. After 10-15 rounds, the model synthesizes your preferences into a document it references for future work. Given this [style guide / doc / brief], interview me using A/B examples to help refine the [tone / style / design] guidance. Present me with two options for a [headline / paragraph / layout / architecture]. First, critique both options. Then ask me which I prefer and why. Use my answers to write a 1-page “Essence” document summarizing my taste in this domain. The Essence document becomes a reusable asset. I’ve done this for writing style, UI design preferences, and code architecture patterns. I now run this process for every new domain before generating anything significant. Increasingly every remaining task I do by hand, I also run AI on the same task in the background with minimal context. If I’m writing a blog post, I have AI write one too before I start. If I’m designing an architecture, I have AI propose one in parallel. Then I compare. Here is the [requirements doc / ticket / brief]. Propose a full [architecture / system design / data model]. Include your reasoning for each major decision. The value isn’t in which draft is better. It’s in where I flinch. The moments where the AI output feels off, where the slop is obvious to me but hard to name, those reactions are taste made visible. And the places where I’m contributing something the model didn’t, those are my actual alpha. Over time, the flinch points become encodable. I note them down, turn them into constraints, and feed them back into the system. This does two things at once: it helps me identify where my taste actually lives, and it gives me the language to express preferences I previously couldn’t articulate. The gap between my draft and the AI’s draft shrinks, but my ability to direct the output sharpens because I’m forced to make the tacit explicit. Your own taste has blind spots. One way I augment mine is by extracting the approximate taste of other people and running it through AI. In practice, this means using tasks ( aka dynamic subagents ) in Claude Code that represent specific perspectives 5 : An audience segment I’m writing for. A manager or coworker whose judgment I trust. A writer or brand whose voice I admire. I feed them real context: Zoom transcripts from calls, written feedback I’ve received, published work I want to learn from. Then I ask each agent to independently review whatever I’m building or writing. Use a task to read the attached [transcript / feedback thread / writing samples] from [person or role]. Extract their values, preferences, and recurring critiques. Then review this [draft / design / architecture] as if you were that person. Flag what they’d push back on, what they’d approve of, and what they’d want to see more of. A screenshot of Claude Code tasks reviewing this post. In a very meta way, it actually suggested adding this image to illustrate. It’s not a replacement for real feedback, but it catches the obvious misses before I ask for it. And it compounds: every round of external review surfaces blind spots in my own taste that I can then fold into my Essence documents and constraints. This also means the real feedback I get back is higher-signal too. Everything above is about extracting your taste to stay ahead. But there’s a catch: you’re not the only one extracting. TikTok doesn’t need any individual user to have great taste. It collects millions of low-signal interactions (swipes, watch time, replays, skips) and synthesizes something that functions like taste at industrial scale. No single swipe is valuable. In aggregate, those micro-signals train a recommendation system that N billion people spend hours inside daily. YouTube, Spotify, Instagram, Netflix: every app with an algorithmic feed is essentially a taste factory. The factory doesn’t just curate what humans make; it increasingly curates what AI makes, selecting for whatever the aggregate says “good” looks like. The extraction workflow that empowers you at the role level simultaneously trains these platforms. Your prompts, preferences, and clicks all teach systems that then compete with your own judgment. And this doesn’t require anyone to train directly on your data. It happens indirectly: your taste-informed outputs perform well, get clicked, shared, imitated, and that performance signal feeds back into the next generation of models and recommendation systems. The platform learns what “good” looks like from millions of people, then serves it back at scale without needing any of them individually. In the extreme, platforms could become the primary owners of taste, not individuals. Our role shifts from having taste to feeding it. The system doesn’t need to match your judgment on any specific decision; it just needs enough signal from enough people to converge on something the market accepts. The “platform” here might not even be the feeds, but could be the labs and token producers. Can taste be taught? If it develops through some opaque function of experience and exposure, what happens to people who haven’t had the right experiences? Dario warned about AI “slicing by cognitive ability,” creating stratification based on traits harder to change than specific skills 6 . Taste is a version of that divide. Do taste roles mean more hiring or less? Right now, the pattern is fewer people with more leverage: marketing teams shrink, one designer steers what five used to produce. But if the job is encoding judgment, don’t you actually want more people sourcing taste from more angles? A single extractor’s blind spots become the system’s blind spots. Who wins the taste race: individuals or platforms? Every extraction technique in this post works in both directions. You encode your judgment to scale your leverage; the platform collects that same signal to scale without you. If the platform can interview me better than I can articulate myself, farm preferences from millions of users simultaneously, and apply the aggregate at near-zero cost, does individual taste become a contribution to someone else’s moat? If so, will people accept taste farming as work? If platforms need human micro-signals to train their systems, does “pay per swipe” become a job category? If AI results in far fewer jobs, is this the remaining option? Who reaps the majority value of individual taste at that point? The people calling taste a moat are right that it matters. They’re wrong that it’s yours to keep. The more I practice articulating my own taste, the less sure I become that it’s durable. Thanks for reading Shrivu’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. A moat, in business strategy, is a structural advantage that’s hard to replicate: a patent, a network effect, a regulatory lock-in. You build it once and competitors can’t easily cross it. Alpha, in finance, is the return you earn above what the market gives you for free, the gap between a hedge fund’s performance and a simple index fund. The key difference: a moat persists by design, but alpha decays. The more people discover the same strategy, the more the market absorbs it, and the edge shrinks. Taste behaves like alpha, not a moat. Your judgment is only valuable relative to what AI produces by default, and that default gets better on its own. I say this from the perspective of someone who works for a fairly AI-native organization and spends time with a lot of people who are in the SF AI bubble. I recognize that there’s still quite a few jobs out there that are now trivially done by AI but are still being done by humans as AI transformation takes time to diffuse to the rest of the world. Two things happen at once. First, without externalized standards, AI outputs regress to the distribution it was trained on. Each new session starts from that distribution’s center, not from where you left off, so quality flattens toward the median. Second, that median itself keeps rising. The taste you encode today, your Essence documents, your constraints, your feedback, eventually gets absorbed into training data for the next generation of models. What was your alpha becomes the new default. This doesn’t even require the model to train on your prompts or data directly; it happens indirectly through how your taste-informed outputs perform in the world, what gets clicked, shared, purchased, and imitated, which all feed back into the next training distribution. This is why taste behaves like alpha: your edge above the median is real but temporary, because the median is a moving target that absorbs the signal you feed it. It’s key that you use sub-agents or tasks for this workflow because you want a fresh, unbiased session/context-window to review the work. See The Adolescence of Technology . Cartoon via Nano Banana. In this post, I wanted to focus on taste; how it changes the human role and questions around who owns it. Where the baseline is now Every domain has a threshold where AI crosses from “clearly worse” to “good enough to fool experts.” Those thresholds are falling fast as the models get better and organizations get better at providing the right context. 2024: AI could autocomplete but not architect. Copilot suggestions had a higher churn rate than human code. AI-generated marketing copy was formulaic and easy to spot. AI-generated playlists were novelties, not chart contenders. AI hiring meant keyword-matching resumes with well-documented bias. The consensus across every domain was the same: AI can handle the grunt work, but taste, judgment, and design are ours. 2025: “Vibe coding” became mainstream. Consumers rated AI marketing copy better than professional copywriters. Music listeners couldn’t distinguish AI music from human music. Frontier models are matching human experts on nearly half of tasks across occupations, completing them 100x faster and 100x cheaper. In twelve months, “AI can’t do X” became “AI does X better than most people” in domain after domain. 2026: The majority of US developers use AI coding tools daily. AI-generated music accounts for over a third of daily uploads on major platforms. The question is no longer whether AI can match human taste in a given domain, but how long until it does in yours. Designers stop pushing pixels and start curating. Recruiters stop screening and start calibrating for “high potential”. Product managers stop writing specs and start steering batches of features. An audience segment I’m writing for. A manager or coworker whose judgment I trust. A writer or brand whose voice I admire. Can taste be taught? If it develops through some opaque function of experience and exposure, what happens to people who haven’t had the right experiences? Dario warned about AI “slicing by cognitive ability,” creating stratification based on traits harder to change than specific skills 6 . Taste is a version of that divide. Do taste roles mean more hiring or less? Right now, the pattern is fewer people with more leverage: marketing teams shrink, one designer steers what five used to produce. But if the job is encoding judgment, don’t you actually want more people sourcing taste from more angles? A single extractor’s blind spots become the system’s blind spots. Who wins the taste race: individuals or platforms? Every extraction technique in this post works in both directions. You encode your judgment to scale your leverage; the platform collects that same signal to scale without you. If the platform can interview me better than I can articulate myself, farm preferences from millions of users simultaneously, and apply the aggregate at near-zero cost, does individual taste become a contribution to someone else’s moat? If so, will people accept taste farming as work? If platforms need human micro-signals to train their systems, does “pay per swipe” become a job category? If AI results in far fewer jobs, is this the remaining option? Who reaps the majority value of individual taste at that point?

ai AI design Design business Business
0 views
The Jolly Teapot 2 weeks ago

Is the Mac having a BMW’s Neue Klasse moment?

In the last couple of months, we have seen plenty of rants , reports, analysis , and other exposés about the state of Apple software, whether it is about their bad icon design , bad icon implementation , neglect , more neglect , and plain worrisome trends . The most damning thing of all? All of these complaints are valid at the same time, and, coming from Mac enthusiasts and connoisseurs, they carry a lot of weight. This collective reaction is strong because Apple is not a brand usually associated with poor quality, odd design choices, or a lack of attention to detail. It is particularly notable on the Mac, arguably the most prominent Apple software product when it comes to enthusiasm about the brand and what they stand for. Today, some of the Apple observers and critics are almost in shock of how fast things went bad. There were warning signs before, but the core foundations of what makes the Mac a great computing platform didn’t seem threatened. The problems seemed limited to a few bugs and side apps that were quickly filed under mishaps , and the growing popularity of non-native apps that ignore Mac conventions . Now, even MacOS itself is plagued with symptoms of the “unrefined” disease. Is MacOS becoming another Windows? A couple of years ago, circa 2021, I was using a Windows computer for work. It was fine. Not great, not bad, it was just OK. Most of the tools I have to use at work live in the browser, and I managed to find peace with the few apps I was using, most of them Electron-based, like Obsidian. When I eventually got an M1 MacBook Air as a replacement, it was a breath of fresh air. Not because I’m a Mac user since 2006, but because the Mac is not fine or just OK: it’s great. Mac apps, the “real” Mac apps, are indeed very good. They feel part of the system, whereas on Windows it’s hard to distinguish between a web-wrapped app and a native app. They all feel the same. Ty Bolt said it best writing about Panic’s Nova (emphasis mine): Nova is one of the best pieces of software I’ve ever used. It’s refined and polished and there’s no equivalent on Linux and Windows. It has its own personality, but also feels like an extension of the operating system. Which is a hallmark of a great Mac app. Folks in the community call them Mac-assed Mac apps. These apps are what make MacOS really great. The best apps I have used are all Mac apps. For me, this quote is what the Mac is all about. But with all the current issues documented on MacOS Tahoe, it is not as easy to look down on Windows as it once was. For users like me, who appreciate a certain level of precision and craftsmanship in software and love Apple because of that — especially the Mac — this trend is worrisome. We know that Apple is not going away, but the Apple we love seems distracted. We worry that the Mac won’t ever feel like the Mac we love today again. We worry that our habits, our taste, and our commitments to a platform will become pointless and dépassés . We worry because there is not a proper alternative to the Mac environment. Users with a different set of tastes, values, and habits, users who may use a Mac for their best-in-class chips, but not for its software, won't understand. Some users who already use and love Linux or Windows (and easily switch between the two), for their set of tastes, values, and habits, won't understand. Users who use a Mac just to live inside a Chrome/Electron landscape of apps won't understand. This period of neglect may be over soon. It may go on for another few years. It may also be all downhill from here. We just don't know. We have to wait, we have to hope, and we have to continue pointing out what feels off about the platform we love. The most cynical will point to the obvious, saying that Mac enthusiasts are not where the money is these days for Apple. This would explain a lot, and it's very tempting to think that way. But I thought of something that may sound like wishful thinking: What if Apple is having its own BMW-Neue-Klasse moment? For BMW, Neue Klasse is the name of their brand reset, their upcoming generation of cars, from the design language to the production platform to the actual vehicle models. It was announced a few years ago, in the midst of the transition to the electric-first era. For BMW, this meant reaffirming the brand, getting back to its roots , and embracing what makes BMW a well-loved and praised car manufacturer. This kind of transition takes a lot of time, effort, and money. Between the announcement and today, brand enthusiasts and critics have perceived a regression in quality and finish , and have felt that the brand has lost touch with its premium foundations and with what makes them love it in the first place. Optimists and apologists will explain this by saying that BMW has put all their best talents and resources towards the Neue Klasse. They will tell you that the current line of models and its related perceived-quality issues are temporary while they reallocated some of their best teams , a necessary low to set things anew, with the upcoming generation of vehicles. As far as I can understand, the reasoning is that BMW knew it had enough brand capital to absorb a few awkward design cycles and perceived drops in interior quality. They surfed on their existing reputation while spending a lot of resources on a platform reset, hoping for a smooth transition. It may hurt them a little , but they considered it a small price to pay to be able to embrace this new era confidently, and regain what was lost. I want to imagine that the same thing is happening at Apple. What if the last couple of years were a transition for Apple? Unlike BMW, Apple would not share their own Neue Klasse vision: they would just unveil it when it’s ready and keep it a secret until then. Meanwhile, their best engineers, designers, and product people are reassigned and working hard on a new generation of MacOS, something that is a big step forward. Maybe Apple thinks that, for the current lineup, helped by the greatest hardware the Mac ever had, the limited resources and ongoing problems are an acceptable compromise, for now. * 1 Mark Gurman would probably have shared the scoop if that were what was really happening, but I’ll keep hoping this “Mac reset” is actually happening and good (and not a failed renaissance). After all, the Neue Klasse era could end up being a disaster, and the worrying signs we’re seeing are actually just the beginning of the end. For Apple, if we are indeed witnessing the first signs of a company that has lost its touch, if we are already at a point of no return when it comes to MacOS quality, the potential downfall won’t be nearly as consequential as it could be for BMW. Apple could lose money for decades and still be one of the richest companies in the world. Without the Mac (just 6% of revenue ), Apple would post similar financial reports for years to come. * 2 For the Mac enthusiasts like myself, there are only three upcoming scenarios in my mind right now. One, the Mac we love returns, either in its current form or as a “new class” of Mac (MacOS XX?) and all of this will just be a bad memory. Two, the Mac keeps on getting worse and worse to the point of driving long-time users away, and it ends up getting replaced with yet another version of iOS on MacBooks. Three, all operating systems end up being background tasks in the A.I. era anyway , and Apple knows this and doesn’t bother anymore. This is maybe what happened back in the butterfly keyboard era: Apple were working on the Apple-silicon Macs, and focused most of their resources towards that, hence the Mac computers of that era being underserved. I am clearly speculating, but you get my point. ^ I wonder for what part of these 6% the Mac enthusiasts are responsible for. Maybe 5%? 10%? I’m pretty sure most of the Mac revenue comes from users who won’t pay attention to all of this. ^ This is maybe what happened back in the butterfly keyboard era: Apple were working on the Apple-silicon Macs, and focused most of their resources towards that, hence the Mac computers of that era being underserved. I am clearly speculating, but you get my point. ^ I wonder for what part of these 6% the Mac enthusiasts are responsible for. Maybe 5%? 10%? I’m pretty sure most of the Mac revenue comes from users who won’t pay attention to all of this. ^

business Business design Design
1 views
fLaMEd fury 2 weeks ago

Fresh 88x31 Buttons

What’s going on, Internet? Besides having an amazing website, 32-Bit Cafe community member Ritual pumps out little projects like no tomorrow. One of those projects is the 88x31 Button Creator , and I couldn’t resist taking it for a spin. The process was straightforward once I figured out what all the options did. Here are the buttons I came up with: If you do make one using Dan’s generator, just remember to use the “download” button rather than right clicking to save it. I’ve talked about Relics Of The Web previously and I love the 88x31 format, but I still think we could have a good time with a larger banner size too. Maybe Dan’s next project could be a banner generator? Let’s make it happen, lol. I’ve added these to my button archive . You may have also noticed I’ve brought the button display back to the homepage. I’ll continue adding interesting display badges over time. Hey, thanks for reading this post in your feed reader! Want to chat? Reply by email or add me on XMPP , or send a webmention . Check out the posts archive on the website.

design Design web-development Web Development
0 views
Jim Nielsen 2 weeks ago

A Brief History of App Icons From Apple’s Creator Studio

I recently updated my collection of macOS icons to include Apple’s new “Creator Studio” family of icons. Doing this — in tandem with seeing funny things like this post on Mastodon — got me thinking about the history of these icons. I built a feature on my icon gallery sites that’s useful for comparing icons over time. For example, here’s Keynote : (Unfortunately, the newest Keynote isn’t part of that collection because I have them linked in my data by their App Store ID and it’s not the same ID anymore for the Creator Studio app — I’m going to have to look at addressing that somehow so they all show up together in my collection.) That’s one useful way of looking at these icons. But I wanted to see them side-by-side, so I dug them all up. Now, my collection of macOS icons isn’t complete. It doesn’t show every variant since the beginning of time, but it’s still interesting to see what’s changed within my own collection. So, without further ado, I present the variants in my collection. The years labeled in the screenshots represent the year in which I added the to my collection (not necessarily the year that Apple changed them). For convenience, I’ve included a link to the screenshot of icons as they exist in my collection ( how I made that page , if you’re interested). Final Cut Pro: Compressor: Pixelmator Pro: (Granted, Pixelmator wasn’t one of Apple’s own apps until recently but its changes follow the same pattern showing how Apple sets the tone for itself as well as the ecosystem.) One last non-visual thing I noticed while looking through these icons in my archive. Apple used to call their own apps in the App Store by their name, e.g. “Keynote”. But now Apple seems to have latched on to what the ecosystem does by attaching a description to the name of the app, e.g. “Keynote: Design Presentations”. Reply via: Email · Mastodon · Bluesky Keynote -> Keynote: Design Presentations Pages -> Pages: Create Documents Numbers -> Numbers: Make Spreadsheets Final Cut Pro -> Final Cut Pro: Create Video Compressor -> Compressor: Encode Media Logic Pro -> Logic Pro: Make Music MainStage -> MainStage: Perform Live Pixelmator Pro -> Pixelmator Pro: Edit Images

design Design
3 views
David Bushell 2 weeks ago

Big Design, Bold Ideas

I’ve only gone and done it again! I redesigned my website. This is the eleventh major version. I dare say it’s my best attempt yet. There are similarities to what came before and plenty of fresh CSS paint to modernise the style. You can visit my time machine to see the ten previous designs that have graced my homepage. Almost two decades of work. What a journey! I’ve been comfortable and coasting for years. This year feels different. I’ve made a career building for the open web. That is now under attack. Both my career, and the web. A rising sea of slop is drowning out all common sense. I’m seeing peers struggle to find work, others succumb to the chatbot psychosis. There is no good reason for such drastic change. Yet change is being forced by the AI industrial complex on its relentless path of destruction. I’m not shy about my stance on AI . No thanks! My new homepage doubles down. I won’t be forced to use AI but I can’t ignore it. Can’t ignore the harm. Also I just felt like a new look was due. Last time I mocked up a concept in Adobe XD . Adobe in now unfashionable and Figma, although swank, has that Silicon Valley stench . Penpot is where the cool kids paint pretty pictures of websites. I’m somewhat of an artist myself so I gave Penpot a go. My current brand began in 2016 and evolved in 2018 . I loved the old design but the rigid layout didn’t afford much room to play with content. I spent a day pushing pixels and was quite chuffed with the results. I designed my bandit game in Pentpot too (below). That gave me the confidence to move into real code. I’m continuing with Atkinson Hyperlegible Next for body copy. I now license Ahkio for headings. I used Komika Title before but the all-caps was unwieldy. I’m too lazy to dig through backups to find my logotype source. If you know what font “David” is please tell me! I worked with Axia Create on brand strategy. On that front, we’ll have more exciting news to share later in the year! For now what I realised is that my audience here is technical. The days of small business owners seeking me are long gone. That market is served by Squarespace or Wix. It’s senior tech leads who are entrusted to find and recruit me, and peers within the industry who recommend me. This understanding gave me focus. To illustrate why AI is lame I made an interactive mini-game! The slot machine metaphor should be self-explanatory. I figured a bit of comedy would drive home my AI policy . In the current economy if you don’t have a sparkle emoji is it even a website? The game is built with HTML canvas, web components, and synchronised events I over-complicated to ensure a unique set of prizes. The secret to high performance motion blur is to cheat with pre-rendered PNGs. In hindsight I could have cheated more with a video. I commissioned Declan Chidlow to create a bespoke icon set. Declan delivered! The icons look so much better than the random assortment of placeholders I found. I’m glad I got a proper job done. I have neither the time nor skill for icons. Declan read my mind because I received a 88×31 web badge bonus gift. I had mocked up a few badges myself in Penpot. Scroll down to see them in the footer. Declan’s badge is first and my attempts follow. I haven’t quite nailed the pixel look yet. My new menu is built using with invoker commands and view transitions for a JavaScript-free experience. Modern web standards are so cool when the work together! I do have a tiny JS event listener to polyfill old browsers. The pixellated footer gradient is done with a WebGL shader. I had big plans but after several hours and too many Stack Overflow tabs, I moved on to more important things. This may turn into something later but I doubt I’ll progress trying to learn WebGL. Past features like my Wasm static search and speech synthesis remain on the relevant blog pages. I suspect I’ll be finding random one-off features I forgot to restyle. My homepage ends with another strong message. The internet is dominated by US-based big tech. Before backing powers across the Atlantic, consider UK and EU alternatives. The web begins at home. I remain open to working with clients and collaborators worldwide. I use some ‘big tech’ but I’m making an effort to push for European alternatives. US-based tech does not automatically mean “bad” but the absolute worst is certainly thriving there! Yeah I’m English, far from the smartest kind of European, but I try my best. I’ve been fortunate to find work despite the AI threat. I’m optimistic and I refuse to back down from calling out slop for what it is! I strongly believe others still care about a job well done. I very much doubt the touted “10x productivity” is resulting in 10x profits. The way I see it, I’m cheaper, better, and more ethical than subsidised slop. Let me know on the socials if you love or hate my new design :) P.S. I published this Sunday because Heisenbugs only appear in production. Thanks for reading! Follow me on Mastodon and Bluesky . Subscribe to my Blog and Notes or Combined feeds.

design Design html HTML web Web ai AI css CSS
0 views
HeyDingus 2 weeks ago

7 Things This Week [#182]

A weekly list of interesting things I found on the internet, posted on Sundays. Sometimes themed, often not. 1️⃣ Jose Munoz has a good tip for not getting sucked into doom-scrolling apps by Siri Suggestions in Search and the App Library: simply hide them from those areas. [ 🔗 josemunozmatos.com ] 2️⃣ I love a good stats-based pitch. Herman provides one for the benefits of morning exercise. [ 🔗 herman.bearblog.dev ] 3️⃣ Jason Fried explains a clever design detail about the power reserve indicator on a mechanical watch. [ 🔗 world.hey.com ] 4️⃣ I found myself nodding along to Chris Coyier’s list of words you should probably avoid using in your writing. [ 🔗 css-tricks.com ] 5️⃣ I spent a surprising amount of time recently perusing the depths of Louie Mantia’s portfolio and blog after reading his People & Blogs interview . He’s worked on so many cool things, lots of which have touched my life. [ 🔗 lmnt.me ] 6️⃣ Robert Birming made me feel a little better about my less-than-tidy house. [ 🔗 robertbirming.com ] 7️⃣ I’m not going to buy it, but I’m certainly intrigued by this tiny eReader that attaches via MagSafe onto the back of your phone. I love my Kobo, but it so often gets left behind. This would be a remedy. [ 🔗 theverge.com ] Thanks for reading 7 Things . If you enjoyed these links or have something neat to share, please let me know . And remember that you can get more links to internet nuggets that I’m finding every day by following me @jarrod on the social web. HeyDingus is a blog by Jarrod Blundy about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings. If you like what you see — the blog posts , shortcuts , wallpapers , scripts , or anything — please consider leaving a tip , checking out my store , or just sharing my work. Your support is much appreciated! I’m always happy to hear from you on social , or by good ol' email .

design Design writing Writing css CSS hardware Hardware
0 views
Kev Quirk 3 weeks ago

I've Moved to Pure Blog!

In my last post I introduced Pure Blog and ended the post by saying: I'm going to take a little break from coding for a few days, then come back and start migrating this site over to Pure Blog. Dogfoodin' yo! Yeah, I didn't take a break. Instead I've pretty much spent my entire weekend at the computer migrating this site from Jekyll to Pure Blog, and trying to make sure everything works ok. Along the way there were features that I wanted to add into Pure Blog to make my live easier, which I've now done, these include: As well as all this, I've also changed the way Pure Blog is formatted so that it's easier for people to update their Pure Blog version. While I was there, I also added a simple little update page in settings so people can see if they're running the latest version or not: Finally, I decided to give the site a new lick of paint. Which was by far the easiest part of this whole thing - just some custom CSS in the CMS and I ended up with this nice (albeit brutal) new design. The way I've architected Pure Blog should allow me to very easily change the design going forward, which is just fantastic for a perpetual fiddler, such as myself. OK, that's enough for one weekend. I hope publishing this post doesn't bring any other issues to the surface, but we shall see. Now I really am going to take a break from coding. This has been so much fun, and I continue to learn a lot. For now though, my brain needs a rest. Oh, if you're using Pure Blog, please do let me know - I'd love to hear your feedback. The reply button below should be working fine. 🙃 Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is great, and you're great for using it. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment . Hooks so I can automatically purge Bunny CDN cache when posts are published/updated. Implementing data files so I can generate things like my Blogroll and Projects pages from YML lists. Adding shortcodes so I can have a site wide email setting and things like my Reply by email button works at the bottom of every post. Post layout partial so I can add custom content below my posts without moving away from Pure Blog's upstream code.

web-development Web Development design Design css CSS
0 views
Martin Alderson 3 weeks ago

How to generate good looking reports with Claude Code, Cowork or Codex

A step-by-step guide to extracting your brand design system and generating on-brand PDF reports and slide decks using coding agents.

design Design tutorial Tutorial
0 views
Brain Baking 3 weeks ago

Creating Buttons To Remember Things

My wife recently bought a device to scratch her creative crafting itch: a button press . At first, I dismissed it as yet another thing requiring space in her increasingly messy atelier. I don’t know how we manage to do it but we seem to be experts in gathering things that gather things themselves: dust. But now that she finally started doing something with it, I was secretly becoming interested in what it could mean for our scrapbook making. The button press in question is a “We R Makers Button Press Bundle All-In-One Kit” that comes with press, a few add-on peripherals that allow you to modify how it cuts and presses, and of course the buttons themselves. The button press in action, about to create a 'little monster'. Since handling the lever requires a bit of pressure to correctly cut and a second time fit the cut circle inside the button, I yelled TSJAKKA every time she would press it, to great joy of our daughter. She now calls it the Tsjakka . “Daddy, can we make another little monster with Tjsakka?” Because my first instinct after thinking about what kind of buttons I wanted was to print a variant of the Alien Lisp Mascot —a green monster with five eyes. Fellow nerds reading this might have covered their entire laptop back with cool looking stickers: a Docker container sticker, an IDEA logo one, the GitHub Octocat, and god knows what else you managed to nab from a conference table. While I always found those laptops to be just cute, I never wanted to soil mine with a sticker of some technology stack that I would grow to hate a few years later. Thanks to a random takeover by Microsoft sharks, for instance. *cough* Give Up Github *cough*. So why not a programming language mascot? Java’s The Duke? No way, I’m not that big of a Java fan. The Gopher perhaps? Better, but no. If I was to wear a badge, smack on a sticker somewhere prominent, it would have to be of something that makes me happy. Go is cool but boring. Java brings in a lot of money but smells like enterprise mud. So far, I haven’t encountered a single programming language that truly makes me happy. But Lisp is coming very close. The Lisp Alien it is, then: The result: three buttons pinned to the inside of my bike bag. One of the other two buttons is self-explanatory: the Brain Baking logo. The first one on the upper left is a part of my late father-in-law’s master’s thesis; an electronic schematic with resistors. The embossed logo on the button press, below the We R name, reads: Memory Keepers. Which is exactly what that button is for. They market it as a way to permanently record precious memories—and wear them on your sleeve . I think it’s brilliant. We don’t have an endless supply of metal clips and plastic caps to press that memory in so we have to be mindful: which one’s do we really want to create? Sure you can buy more and it’s not expensive, but that’s not the point. The point is that there won’t be a Duke on my bag, but there will be a Brain Baking logo. And, apparently, a warning. Most folks pin these buttons onto the obvious visible part of their bag. But I don’t want to come across as a button lunatic (at least not at first sight). A more convincing argument then: the bag I pinned it on is a simple detachable laptop cycle bag . The exterior gets wet now and then. I highly doubt that the button is water resistant. The third but slightly less convincing argument is that the buttons rattle quite a bit as the needle on the back used to pin it onto something sits quite loose in its metal socket. Perhaps that depends from product type to type. As you might have guessed, our daughter now is dead set on pinning a little monster on her bag she uses carry her lunch go to school. We’ll first have to ask Tjsakka to get back to work. Related topics: / crafting / By Wouter Groeneveld on 7 February 2026.  Reply via email .

design Design Electronics hardware Hardware java Java
0 views
ava's blog 3 weeks ago

videos/channels i enjoyed lately

Feeling like sharing some of my recent finds. I've been checking up on Mochii's channel for quite a while now. She always inspires me to stay weird, silly and creative, and reminds me that you are still cherished and admired when you are different. I feel pushed to finally get deeper into my personal style :) The stuff she's saying might not be novel or can be a little bit naive due to age or lack of experiences, but I still enjoy watching it and thinking of my own reasons or thoughts. Her videos feel like early YouTube and very earnest and non-performative. Recent videos I loved were: The magic of reconnecting with your inner child , The purpose of the Muse in society , and Your lack of emotional boundaries is making you fear intimacy . The Muse video came at a good time, since I had recently scheduled an upcoming 'small thoughts' post that kinda deals with you clashing with the mental image others have of you in your head, specifically about kindness. You'll see. I came across abracadeborah's channel two days ago and have been binging it. I love these sorts of art channels and at events that have them, I am glued to the artist alley, spending a lot of money on stickers Part 1 , Part 2 , and Part 3 . I didn't seek this out, but once I saw one video, I wanted to know more. It has weirdly inspired me to try and make a brand kit some time, mainly for my other more professional website I haven't linked here, but maybe also for my matcha blog. I could also do one for fun for this blog, as a practice and intention. Don't worry, none of this blog is getting used as a portfolio or monetized 1 ; I just like the creative aspect of being intentional about color palettes being used and how, you know? This blog started so casually and with tweaks here and there over the years, it's interesting to me to sit down and see what has stayed and became a staple - like my heart scribble underneath the title. I have always winged everything about its design, lots of it was on a whim or randomly picking a color until it "looked right", but I wanna see if I can retrospectively see some rules and trends in the way I design things. I've been happy to see that D'Angelo is back. I was scared I wouldn't like his new format, but I've been liking it even more than his old stuff. I love how unapologetic he is about things and the nuance he brings to the discussion. It takes a lot nowadays to not letting the masses push you into very specific categories of opinion, especially in his position where thousands of people can yell at him in the comments. It's refreshing to see someone with clear boundaries, a clear view and approach to things that is not dancing around viewer/algorithm approval in the commentary space. It's been pointed out by many lately, but it can feel like all commentary YouTubers release the same video at the same time with the same opinions, and even when I disagree with D'Angelo sometimes, it's never sensationalized, never presented as the only truth, and it's well-reasoned. It feels calm and like a conversation in real life where all parties assume the best intent. It's an upgrade compared to his old content, especially after what happened to him before the break, when he tried his best to please a very difficult small part of his viewership that were unreasonable in their expectations. If a lot of eyes in a given space are directed at you, there's this pressure to accommodate everyone, bow to all demands, and be very neutral, very nice, forgiving and open to anything. The new D'Angelo reminds me that you don't have to do that. He has a bit of a spat going on with Caleb Hammer (an extremely toxic and disgusting person) at the moment, and at the end of one of the videos, he reacted (around 32:10) to Caleb backtracking his mean stuff and wanting to collaborate and directly talk with D'Angelo. And D'Angelo openly says that he doesn't wanna talk, and he accepts how that can be spun into him being seen as intolerant, and that he doesn't care and meant everything he said. Kudos to that. You cannot let people's (at times absurd) reactions dictate what you say or stand for. I've been following Madisyn Brown for a while as well, and she has also shifted her content and approach lately. I'm glad she "graduated" from the commentary videos she did before. She seems happier, glowier, and I appreciate witnessing others pursuing their passions unironically, unashamedly and forcefully. I loved Stop waiting for life to give you permission because it comes at such a fitting time for me; trying to bruteforce all the doors open for me. Volunteering more, finishing my degree faster, doing extra work at work and networking with people and annoying leadership to get stuff done that I want to see 2 . :) Madisyn is very laser-focused on her music career and candid about everything she needs to do for it. What was especially healing to hear is the aspect of owning what you want to be, being upfront about it and not being afraid to call yourself what you are and want to be. There's this hesitancy for people to finally embrace a label - at what point can you call yourself a writer, an artist, a singer, a songwriter, a poet, a blogger, a privacy professional? We set up milestones for that that seem arbitrary at times and sometimes move the goalposts until we are finally a "real" (label). But you can't be afraid to step onto the scene and to introduce yourself like that. It helps tremendously to wake up in the morning and pretend you already are the person you want to be - privately, professionally, whatever. If you put in the work, you are that. You can't wait until a specific moment or until someone else calls you that or a permission slip to start doing that for yourself. Reply via email Published 06 Feb, 2026 I actually have a scheduled post that will go up in a while about how bothersome I find it that lots of the internet has to be monetized or be someone's portfolio or SaaS attempt. While writing it, I wondered: Am I a hypocrite, am I doing this here too? After all, I write more about data protection, a career I am working towards and already partially engage in, and I plan to host some DPO interviews. But I have no plans to ever link this blog in a CV, or to my professional presence, or put it on a business card. I try to act in a way that if an employer ever found this, it wouldn't harm them or me, but I would not intentionally make it known to them. An exception would be if they found me through my blog and wanted to hire me, I guess, but that is slim :) If you are personally passionate about a field, I guess it is bound to mix private and professional; but on here, I can talk about it way more casually and I try to break concepts down to laypeople, especially things that touch them (usually around social media and similar). Professionally, I'd love to work with health data, AI compliance, and potentially work in research, NGOs and government bodies. This blog is about engaging with the field as a hobby, which is different to what I would like to do with it as a job. ↩ More about that in my path to data protection post (very long). ↩ I've been checking up on Mochii's channel for quite a while now. She always inspires me to stay weird, silly and creative, and reminds me that you are still cherished and admired when you are different. I feel pushed to finally get deeper into my personal style :) The stuff she's saying might not be novel or can be a little bit naive due to age or lack of experiences, but I still enjoy watching it and thinking of my own reasons or thoughts. Her videos feel like early YouTube and very earnest and non-performative. Recent videos I loved were: The magic of reconnecting with your inner child , The purpose of the Muse in society , and Your lack of emotional boundaries is making you fear intimacy . The Muse video came at a good time, since I had recently scheduled an upcoming 'small thoughts' post that kinda deals with you clashing with the mental image others have of you in your head, specifically about kindness. You'll see. I came across abracadeborah's channel two days ago and have been binging it. I love these sorts of art channels and at events that have them, I am glued to the artist alley, spending a lot of money on stickers Part 1 , Part 2 , and Part 3 . I didn't seek this out, but once I saw one video, I wanted to know more. It has weirdly inspired me to try and make a brand kit some time, mainly for my other more professional website I haven't linked here, but maybe also for my matcha blog. I could also do one for fun for this blog, as a practice and intention. Don't worry, none of this blog is getting used as a portfolio or monetized 1 ; I just like the creative aspect of being intentional about color palettes being used and how, you know? This blog started so casually and with tweaks here and there over the years, it's interesting to me to sit down and see what has stayed and became a staple - like my heart scribble underneath the title. I have always winged everything about its design, lots of it was on a whim or randomly picking a color until it "looked right", but I wanna see if I can retrospectively see some rules and trends in the way I design things. I've been happy to see that D'Angelo is back. I was scared I wouldn't like his new format, but I've been liking it even more than his old stuff. I love how unapologetic he is about things and the nuance he brings to the discussion. It takes a lot nowadays to not letting the masses push you into very specific categories of opinion, especially in his position where thousands of people can yell at him in the comments. It's refreshing to see someone with clear boundaries, a clear view and approach to things that is not dancing around viewer/algorithm approval in the commentary space. It's been pointed out by many lately, but it can feel like all commentary YouTubers release the same video at the same time with the same opinions, and even when I disagree with D'Angelo sometimes, it's never sensationalized, never presented as the only truth, and it's well-reasoned. It feels calm and like a conversation in real life where all parties assume the best intent. It's an upgrade compared to his old content, especially after what happened to him before the break, when he tried his best to please a very difficult small part of his viewership that were unreasonable in their expectations. If a lot of eyes in a given space are directed at you, there's this pressure to accommodate everyone, bow to all demands, and be very neutral, very nice, forgiving and open to anything. The new D'Angelo reminds me that you don't have to do that. He has a bit of a spat going on with Caleb Hammer (an extremely toxic and disgusting person) at the moment, and at the end of one of the videos, he reacted (around 32:10) to Caleb backtracking his mean stuff and wanting to collaborate and directly talk with D'Angelo. And D'Angelo openly says that he doesn't wanna talk, and he accepts how that can be spun into him being seen as intolerant, and that he doesn't care and meant everything he said. Kudos to that. You cannot let people's (at times absurd) reactions dictate what you say or stand for. I've been following Madisyn Brown for a while as well, and she has also shifted her content and approach lately. I'm glad she "graduated" from the commentary videos she did before. She seems happier, glowier, and I appreciate witnessing others pursuing their passions unironically, unashamedly and forcefully. I loved Stop waiting for life to give you permission because it comes at such a fitting time for me; trying to bruteforce all the doors open for me. Volunteering more, finishing my degree faster, doing extra work at work and networking with people and annoying leadership to get stuff done that I want to see 2 . :) Madisyn is very laser-focused on her music career and candid about everything she needs to do for it. What was especially healing to hear is the aspect of owning what you want to be, being upfront about it and not being afraid to call yourself what you are and want to be. There's this hesitancy for people to finally embrace a label - at what point can you call yourself a writer, an artist, a singer, a songwriter, a poet, a blogger, a privacy professional? We set up milestones for that that seem arbitrary at times and sometimes move the goalposts until we are finally a "real" (label). But you can't be afraid to step onto the scene and to introduce yourself like that. It helps tremendously to wake up in the morning and pretend you already are the person you want to be - privately, professionally, whatever. If you put in the work, you are that. You can't wait until a specific moment or until someone else calls you that or a permission slip to start doing that for yourself. Mikki C is an older trans woman sharing her journey around recently coming out and starting hormones. There's a lot said about the challenges around employment and family - she was fired for coming out, and her ex-wife is scared for how it will affect their daughter. But there are good moments too, like finding new work, finding support in the local theater club, and first changes in presentation. I am kind of invested in following the journey now :) I actually have a scheduled post that will go up in a while about how bothersome I find it that lots of the internet has to be monetized or be someone's portfolio or SaaS attempt. While writing it, I wondered: Am I a hypocrite, am I doing this here too? After all, I write more about data protection, a career I am working towards and already partially engage in, and I plan to host some DPO interviews. But I have no plans to ever link this blog in a CV, or to my professional presence, or put it on a business card. I try to act in a way that if an employer ever found this, it wouldn't harm them or me, but I would not intentionally make it known to them. An exception would be if they found me through my blog and wanted to hire me, I guess, but that is slim :) If you are personally passionate about a field, I guess it is bound to mix private and professional; but on here, I can talk about it way more casually and I try to break concepts down to laypeople, especially things that touch them (usually around social media and similar). Professionally, I'd love to work with health data, AI compliance, and potentially work in research, NGOs and government bodies. This blog is about engaging with the field as a hobby, which is different to what I would like to do with it as a job. ↩ More about that in my path to data protection post (very long). ↩

design Design entertainment Entertainment culture Culture
0 views
Brain Baking 4 weeks ago

Banning Syntax Highlighting Steroids

I’ve always flip-flopped between so-called “light” and “dark” modes when it comes to code editors. A 2004 screenshot of a random C file opened in GVim proves I was an realy adopter of dark mode, although I never really liked the contemporary Dracula themes when they first appeared. Sure, it was cool and modern-looking, but it also felt like plugging in three pairs of Christmas lights for just one tree. At work, I was usually the weird guy who refused to flip IntelliJ to The Dark Side . And now I’m primarily running a dark theme in Emacs . Allow me to explain. After more than a decade of staring at the default dark theme of Sublime Text, I’m swithing over, but you probably already know that. I never did any serious code work in my beloved : that was mostly for Markdown files and the light edit here and there. For bigger projects, any JetBrains IDEA flavour would do it: I know the shortcuts by heart and “it just works”. So you’ll excuse me for never really paying attention to the syntax highlighting mess that comes with the default dark Sublime theme. And then I read Tonsky’s excellent I am sorry, but everyone is getting syntax highlighting wrong post. Being Tonsky, he was of course right—again. A lightbulb went on somewhere deep within the airy caverns of my brain: “Hey, perhaps I’m not the only one thinking of Christmas trees when I see a random dark theme”. There are exceptions to the rule. I love the Nord theme . I only found out now that of course there’s a JetBrains port. Nord is great because it’s very much muted, or as they like to call it, “An arctic, north-bluish clean and elegant theme”. Here’s in my current Emacs config: The Doom Nord theme: a muted palette of blues. Nord radiates calmness. I love it. But sometimes I feel that it’s a bit too calm and muted. Sometimes, I miss a dash of colour and frivolity in my coding life, without the exaggeration of many themes such as Dracula et al. In that case, there’s Palenight that throws in a cheerful dash of purple. The 2007 GVim on WinXP screenshot proves I was already a fan of purple back then! While that’s great for , general UI usage, and even the Markdown links, it’s a garish mess as soon as you open up a code file. Here’s the Palenight Doom Theme in all its Christmas-y glory whilst editing the exact same Go file from the Nord screenshot above: The Doom Palenight theme: syntax highlighting is all over the place. What’s all that about? Orange (WARNING!) for variable declarations, bright red (ERROR!) for constants, purple (YAY!) for types… Needless to say, my first urge was to rapidly switch back to Nord. But I didn’t. Instead, I applied Tonsky’s rules and modified Palenight into a semi-Alabaster-esque theme: The result is this, the same for the third time: A modified Doom Palenight theme taking the Alabaster philosophy into account. In case you’re interested which faces to alter in Emacs, here’s the snippet I use that is designed to work across themes by stealing foreground colours from general things like and : There’s only one slight problem. Sometimes, altering isn’t good enough. Because of , I also had to “erase” and . And then there’s still only one bigger problem and that’s imports—especially the statements in PHP. They’re horrible. I mean, even besides the stupid backslash. By default, Palenight chooses not one but three colours for a single statement like it’s not much better in Java. Luckily, thanks to modern syntax tree analysis of Tree-sitter, we can pretty easily define rules for specific nodes in the tree. Explore the tree with and you’ll find stuff like Tree-sitter even makes the distinction between and , but we’ll want to mute the entire line, not just a part of it. So we can say something along the lines of which means “apply the font to the .” Throw that in a and we’re all set: Editing a PHP file in Palenight. Left: unedited. Right: with muted imports and applied Alabaster logic. I haven’t yet finalised the changes to the syntax highlighting colour palette—it might be an even better idea to completely dim these imports. Flycheck will add squiggly lines to unused/wrong imports anyway, so do we really need that distinction between unused and used import? Anyway, perhaps it’s not worth fiddling with, as you’ll only see the statements for a second just after opening the file but before scrolling down. Two more minor but significant modifications were needed to make Palenight enjoyable: Picking a font for editing deserves its own blog post. Stay tuned! Addendum: I forgot to mention that by stripping pretty much all colours from syntax highlight font faces, your files will look really boring. By default, “constants” ( , )/numbers and punctuation aren’t treated with anything special, so if you want to highlight the former and dim the latter, you’ll need to rely on and throw in some regex: Related topics: / go / php / emacs / syntax / screenshot / By Wouter Groeneveld on 31 January 2026.  Reply via email . Mute (unset) keywords, everyone knows what and does and nobody cares Replace the error eyebrow-raising colours with a muted blue variant. Get rid of that weird italic when invoking methods. If it ends in , you’ll know you’re calling a method/func, right? Highlight comments in the warning colour instead, as per Tonsky’s advice. It’s a brilliant move and forces you to more carefully think about creating and reading comments. Mute (dim) punctuation. Structural editing and/or your editor should catch you if you fall. Darken the default white foreground with 15% to reduce the contrast. That’s another reason why I didn’t like dark themes. Experiment with specific fonts. I landed on Jetbrains Mono for my font, but the light version, not the normal one. The thicker, the more my eyes have to work, but too thin and I can’t make out the symbols either.

design Design php Php programming Programming java Java
0 views
Evan Schwartz 1 months ago

Building Docs Like a Product

Stripe is famous for having some of the best product docs, largely because they are "designed to feel like an application rather than a traditional user manual" . I spent much of the last week building and writing the docs for Scour, and I am quite proud of the results. Scour is a personalized content feed, not an SDK or API, so I started by asking myself what the equivalent of working code or copyable snippets is for this type of product. The answer: interactive pieces of the product, built right into the docs themselves. The guide for Hacker News readers is one of the sections I'm most proud of. When describing Scour to people, I often start with the origin story of wanting a tool that could search for posts related to my interests from the thousands submitted to HN that never make it to the front page. Built right into the guide is a live search bar that searches posts that have been submitted to HN, but that have not been on the front page . Try it out! You might find some hidden gems. The guides for Redditors , Substack readers , and arXiv readers also have interactive elements that let you easily search for subreddits or newsletters, or subscribe to any of arXiv's categories. Logged in users can subscribe to those feeds right from the docs. Every time I went to explain some aspect of Scour, I first asked myself if there was a way to use a working example instead. On the Interests page, I wanted to explain that the topics you add to Scour can be any free-form text you want. Every time you load the page, this snippet loads a random set of interests that people have added on Scour. You can click any of them to go to the page of content related to that topic and add that interest yourself. While explaining how Scour recommends other topics to you, I thought what if I just included an actual topic recommendation for logged in users? (Graphic Design was actually a Scour recommendation for me, and a good one at that!) On various docs pages, I wanted to explain the settings that exist. Instead of linking to the settings page or describing where to find it, logged in users can just change the settings from within the docs. For example, on the Content Filtering page, you can toggle the setting to hide paywalled content right from the docs: There are numerous live examples throughout the docs. All of those use the same components as the actual Scour website. (Scour is built with the "MASH stack" , so these are all components.) The section explaining that you can show the feeds where any given post was found actually includes the recent post that was found in the most different feeds. (In the docs, you actually need to click the "..." button to show the feeds underneath the post, as shown below.) While building this out, I had a number of cases where I needed to show an example of some component, but where I couldn't show a live component. For example, in the Interest Recommendations section described above, I needed a placeholder for users that aren't logged in. I started building a separate component that looked like the normal interest component... and then stopped. This felt like the type of code that would eventually diverge from the original and I'd forget to update it. So, I went and refactored the original components so that they'd work for static examples too. The last piece of building a documentation experience that I would be happy to use was ensuring that there would be no broken links. No broken links across docs sections, and no broken links from the docs to parts of the application. Scour is built with the excellent HTTP routing library in Rust. The crate has a useful, albeit slightly tedious trait and derive macro. This lets you define HTTP routes as structs, which can be used by the router and anywhere else you might want to link to that page. Anywhere else we might want to link to the Interests docs, we can use the following to get the path: This way, Rust's type system enforces that any link to those docs will stay updated, even if I later move the paths around. I started working on these docs after a couple of users gave the feedback that they would love a page explaining how Scour works. There is now a detailed explanation of how Scour's ranking algorithm works , along with docs explaining everything else I could think of. Please keep the feedback coming! If you still have questions after reading through any of the docs, please let me know so I can keep improving them.

design Design tutorial Tutorial rust Rust web-development Web Development
0 views
Martin Fowler 1 months ago

Bliki: Excessive Bold

I'm increasingly seeing a lot of technical and business writing make heavy use of bold font weights, in an attempt to emphasize what the writers think is important. LLMs seem to have picked up and spread this practice widely. But most of this is self-defeating, the more a writer uses typographical emphasis, the less power it has, quickly reaching the point where it loses all its benefits. There are various typographical tools that are used to emphasize words and phrases, such as: bold, italic, capitals, and underlines. I find that bold is the one that's getting most of the over-use. Using a lot of capitals is rightly reviled as shouting, and when we see it used widely, it raises our doubts on the quality of the underlying thinking. Underlines have become the signal for hyperlinks, so I rarely see this for emphasis any more. Both capitals and underlines have also been seen as rather cheap forms of highlight, since we could do them with typewriters and handwriting, while bold and italics were only possible after the rise of word-processors. (Although I realize most of my readers are too young to remember when word-processors were novel.) Italics are the subtler form of emphasis. When I use them in a paragraph, they don't leap out to the eye. This allows me to use them in long flows of text when I want to set it apart, and when I use it to emphasize a phrase it only makes its presence felt when I'm fully reading the text. For this reason, I prefer to use italics for emphasis, but I only use it rarely, suggesting it's really important to put stress on the word should I be speaking the paragraph (and I always try to write in the way that I speak ). The greatest value of bold is that draws the eye to the bold text even if the reader isn't reading, but glancing over the page. This is an important property, but one that only works if it's used sparingly. Headings are often done in bold, because the it's important to help the reader navigate a longer document by skimming and looking for headings to find the section I want to read. I rarely use bold within a prose paragraph, because of my desire to be parsimonious with bold. One use I do like is to highlight unfamiliar words at the point where I explain them. I got this idea from Giarratano and Riley . I noticed that when the unfamiliar term reappeared, I was often unsure what it meant, but glancing back and finding the bold quickly reminded me. The trick here is to place the bold at point of explanation, which is often, but not always, at its first use. 1 A common idea is to take an important sentence and bold that, so it leaps out while skimming the article. That can be worthwhile, but as ever with this kind of emphasize, its effectiveness is inversely proportional to how often it's used. It's also usually not the best tool for the job. Callouts usually work better. They do a superior job of drawing the eye, and furthermore they don't need to use the same words as in the prose text. This allows me to word the callout better than it could be if it also had to fit in the flow of the prose. A marginal case is where I see bold used in first clause of each item in a bulleted list. In some ways this is acting like a heading for the text in the list. But we don't need a heading for every paragraph, and the presence of the bullets does enough to draw the eye to the items. And bullet-lists are over used too - I always try to write such things as a prose paragraph instead, as prose flows much better than bullets and is thus more pleasant to read. It's important to write in such a way to make it an enjoyable experience for the reader - even, indeed especially, when I'm also trying to explain things for them. While writing this, I was tempted to illustrate my point by using excessive bold in a paragraph, showing the problem and hopefully demonstrating why lots of bold loses the power to emphasize and attract the skimming eye . But I also wanted to explain my position clearly , and I felt that illustrating the problem would thus undermine my attempt . So I've confined the example to a final flourish . (And, yes, I have seen text with as much bold as this.) 1: For example, sometimes a new term will appear first in a list. Eg “We carry out this process in three steps: frobning, gibbling, and eorchisting”. In this case we don't bold the words as they appear in the list but later on when we explain what on earth they mean.

business Business writing Writing design Design
6 views
Pete Warden 1 months ago

See my friend Annie edit videos with her eyes

I first met Annie through her work with Muttville , a local non-profit for adopting senior dogs where we found our MinPin . My wife started editing videos to help get more dogs adopted, and Annie was another volunteer doing the same work. I initially got to know her through her videos, where she did an amazing job bringing out the personalities of all the pups she was showcasing. All of her work has a happy energy, and when I met her in person I realized that all came from her. I was also astonished to find out that she was producing multiple videos a week using just her eyes. Her disability means this is the most effective way for her to interact with a computer, and she has become very proficient with the interface, to the point that she’s playing Far Cry better than I can. Because Annie’s doing such extraordinary work, my wife Joanne decided to collaborate with her on a documentary about her daily life, to share her story and have her voice heard more widely. You can check out the one-minute trailer above, and find the full documentary here . Annie is a big fan of Canva, and uses it for all her video editing. She would love to connect with anyone who works there to pass along her thanks for an application which enables so much creativity. If any of my readers know someone at the company, please pass this along!

media Media design Design
0 views